Tag Archives: Scottish Opera

Scottish Opera: Tristan und Isolde

Posted on by

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

It has become a convenient cliché for cash-strapped companies that the operas of Wagner are best served by minimalist stagings, and Tristan und Isolde is probably the work where that approach is most established.

Concert performances have the huge advantage of the visibility of the orchestra at work, and – especially in this one – those crucial moments when the musicians, singers as well as players, are not visible, but audible from offstage.

In fact this staging was much more than a concert, fully costumed in quasi-medieval style by Scottish Opera’s Lorna Price (in her last show before moving to Glyndebourne), directed by Justin Way, and performed on an apron stage built out from the platform. A second conductor (Toby Hession) was working for the singers from a specially-constructed prompt box, to supplement main man Stuart Stratford’s video-relayed  direction on the podium behind them.

If it was a compromise, it was a hugely successful one. There was just one moment in Act 3 when tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones struggled to make himself heard over the swell of the score, and the balance between singers and orchestra, off-stage and on-stage elements, solo instrumental voices and ensemble precision (particularly all sections of the strings and Sue Baxendale’s horns) was nigh-on perfect all night.

Tristan und Isolde is remembered for its set pieces – the Act 1 Prelude and Act 3 Liebestod and the rapturous duet of Act 2 – but those are part of a narrative flow of music that was, and should still sound, revolutionary, as it did here. Stratford’s shaping of the whole work, every note serving the story-telling, was always captivating; longeurs were there none in over four hours of music.

The cast had lost its King Marke – Richard Wiegold, a veteran in the role, stepping in – and was vocally superb from title roles to the smaller parts, and not excepting the boisterous twenty seamen of the male chorus in Act 1.

Katherine Broderick was imperious as Isolde, consistently delivering those high notes in Wagner’s demanding music from her first entrance to the final scene, seemingly without effort. If the voice was astonishing, the nuances of her acting performance were just as remarkable. This was a fully realised, and deeply flawed, Isolde.

Matching her was mezzo Khatuna Mikaberidze’s Brangane, similarly characterful and powerfully sung, allied to accomplished handling the staging’s few essential props.

If Gwyn Hughes Jones initially seemed to be holding something back, his stoic, even cynical, performance also hinted at an intriguing Tristan that never quite emerged. Perhaps that ambiguity was deliberate, however, as a counterbalance to the ebullient loyal enthusiasm for his master from his batman, Kurwenal – a terrific turn from Korean baritone Hansung Yoo.

Leaving the hall’s platform to the orchestra, the principals made all their entrances and exits to their playing area via the stage-side auditorium doors, and a plinth that incrementally lost sets of steps on either side to become Tristan’s death-bed in Act 3 was the only additional staging. It was also the excuse for the only slacking of pace in the drama when Hughes Jones or Weigold sat on it and there was a suspicion that it was not their characters who were taking the weight off their feet.

For those of us sitting out in the auditorium, this was a five hour feast (including two longer intervals) that passed with remarkable swiftness. The suggestion is that the company plans more Wagner presented in similar style in seasons to come, and that is an enticing prospect.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Khatuna Mikaberidze as Brangane and Katherine Broderick as Isolde, credit Christopher Bowen

All Rise for EIF 2026

Posted on by

After a thinner programme last year, the Edinburgh International Festival boasts a return to full strength on the road to its 80th anniversary celebrations next year, writes KEITH BRUCE.

Orchestral residencies from the Los Angeles and Berlin Philharmonics and Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s new post-pandemic opera The Galloping Cure are headline attractions in the full Edinburgh International Festival programme for August 2026, unveiled today.

The Mazzoli opera follows the acclaimed Breaking the Waves at EIF 2019 and reunites the composer with librettist Royce Vavrek, stage director Tom Morris and conductor Stuart Stratford in a production from Scottish Opera and Opera Ventures.

The cast is headed by Argentinian mezzo Daniela Mack, British soprano Susan Bullock and German baritone Justin Austin.

It joins the already-announced Zurich Opera production of Verdi’s A Masked Ball, a revival of Adele Thomas’s acclaimed 2024 staging, as the staged operas bookending the programme at the Festival Theatre.

Operas in concert at the Usher Hall are Mozart’s Don Giovanni from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Maxim Emelyanychev, with Konstantin Krimmel as Giovanni, Louise Alder as Donna Anna and Brindley Sherratt as the Commendatore, and Strauss’s Elektra from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Karina Canellakis with Irene Theorin in the title role, Vida Mikneviciute as Chrysothemis and Nina Stemme as Klytamnestra.

The Festival has a focus on work from across the Atlantic and its theme, All Rise, is the title of Marsalis’s epic Symphony No 1, whose 12 movements will be the Opening Concert at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 8, teaming the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and its founder, featured soloist and composer with the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers, under the baton of James Gaffigan.

During the following week, the orchestra plays Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige with conductor Chris Crenshaw and then gives two concerts on the evening of August 12 with Yuja Wang at the piano in what is a world premiere collaboration. Marsalis, who is married to Festival director Nicola Benedetti, with whom he has a daughter, has recently announced that he will step down as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in the summer of next year.

The LA Phil residency comes in the final year of its conductor Gustavo Dudamel’s tenure as Music Director. Three concerts include two Beethoven symphonies, Nos 7 and 6, and a family concert teaming the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles with Sistema Scotland’s Big Noise musicians.

Zurich Opera brings Verdi’s A Masked Ball

The Berlin Phil and conductor Kirill Petrenko close the Festival on Sunday August 30 with Scriabin’s Symphony No 3, preceded by Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with soloist Augustin Hadelich. The previous evening the programme is Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4. A sextet from the orchestra gives the Queen’s Hall chamber music recital on the morning of Saturday August 29.

Other highlights at the Usher Hall include two concerts by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal, the first of which is a rare modern-day performance of the full three-hours of Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song of Hiawatha with the Festival Chorus and tenor Nicky Spence among the soloists, and Sir Donald Runnicles conducting his old friends the BBC SSO and the Festival Chorus in Mahler’s Das klagende Lied, with soloists including mezzo Catriona Morison.

The Royal Scottish National Orchestra is in the pit at Edinburgh Playhouse for the visit of San Francisco Ballet. The European premiere of choreographer Aszure Barton’s Mere Mortals is danced to a score by Floating Points (Sam Shepherd), conducted by Martin West.

Colin Currie and his group play an all-Steve Reich programme, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London celebrate the Golden Age of Hollywood, and Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI perform an Atlantic-spanning early music programme.

A day of Bach at the Usher Hall on Saturday August 22 starts with an invitation to “Come and Sing” Chorales, and has Alisa Weilerstein playing all the cello suites and pianist Vikingur Olafsson giving a late evening concert.

There is a tribute to the late Scottish trumpeter John Wallace from the band he founded, The Wallace Collection in partnership with the Cooperation Band and musicians from all three Scottish orchestras under conductor Clark Rundell, and the Queen’s Hall programme includes a tribute to pianist Alfred Brendel in three recitals of music associated with the great stalwart of Festivals past by Steven Osborne, Paul Lewis and Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Debuts at the Queen’s Hall include those of mezzo Beth Taylor and guitarist Sean Shibe and that series opens with Dunedin Consort performing Tansy Davies’s new work Passion of Mary Magdelene with Anna Dennis and Marcus Farnsworth. Scottish Ensemble combines forces with small-pipes virtuoso Brighde Chaimbeul in another world premiere collaboration.

A full jazz, traditional music and folk programme at the EIF’s Royal Mile home, The Hub also includes Benedetti’s Classical Jam and a return visit from the global stars of the Aga Khan Music Programme.

Introducing her fourth Festival, Benedetti said: “Marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, we put America firmly in the spotlight. The American story is filled with innovation and ingenuity, perseverance and prejudice – tensions that have fuelled some of the most extraordinary artistic achievements in history.

“Our 2026 Festival is an invitation to All Rise together, and in doing so we celebrate not only artistic excellence but the resilience and flourishing of the human spirit.”

Tickets for EIF 2026 are on sale from noon on Thursday March 26 with priority booking for members and friends opening a week earlier. Full details at eif.co.uk

Picture of Zurich Opera’s A Masked Ball by Herwig Prammer; Nicola Benedetti and Wynton Marsalis by Carl Bigmore

Scottish Opera: The Great Wave

Posted on by

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

There’s no denying the ambition behind The Great Wave, a substantial full-length opera by composer Dai Fujikura and librettist Harry Ross that aims to project the extraordinary biography of 18th/19th century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai as a universal embodiment of the creative spirit. At Thursday’s premiere of this undeniably bold co-production between Scottish Opera and Japanese concert agency KAJIMOTO (it travels to Tokyo after a mere four Scottish performances across Glasgow and Edinburgh) such dual ambition struggled to justify its two-hour presence in our lives.

Hokusai’s iconic Ukiyo-e printmaking and book illustrations effectively revolutionised the industrial scale commercialisation of art. He is best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a dynamic man-against-nature, Persian blue image of fishermen battling a mountainous wave with Mount Fuji stoically set in the background. It later inspired Debussy’s La Mer, not to mention the popular Apple emoji for “wave”. Somehow, the image’s symbolic omnipresence in this production reflects more the opera’s resistance to momentum than any promise of compelling magnetism.

The Great Wave begins with Hokusai’s death, the lengthy silence surrounding his coffin broken by the devotional keening of his daughter Oi (soprano Julieth Lozano Rolong) and the release of his spirit musically scented by the ethereal breathiness of the Shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese flute. Episodes in his long life – he died approaching 90, was struck by lightning on two occasions and expected to live to 110 – are revisited in a sequence of flashbacks that attempt to substantiate his creative immortality. 

Some magical elements emerge in the process. By and large, Satoshi Miyagi’s stage direction is sharply expressive, stylised in a quasi-ritualistic sense, softened by genuinely compassionate interactions, if prone to weird bouts of silliness. Odd snatches of humour are underplayed or too compartmentalised to produce much more than a hesitant audience titter. 

Similarly Akiko Kitamura’s choreography makes effective use of the cast’s professional dancers and mechanically-synchronised chorus, but submits now and again to self-caricature. More consistent, and aligning persuasively with Miyagi’s figurative simplicity, are Junpei Kiz’s vivid set designs and their interaction with Sho Yamaguchi’s morphing video effects and Kayo Takahashi Deschene’s mono-toned costumes.

What disappoints repeatedly, though, is the impotency of Fujikura’s vocal writing and his struggle to sustain organic development: that sense of prolonged musical journey, of heightening lyrical tensions, of inevitably reaching a destination. That, in itself, may have accounted for some inconsistent performances on opening night. 

As Hokusai, Daisuke Ohyama struggled to project his lower register, but had no problem with the hysterical falsetto that animated a rather manically divergent scene about a “smelly fart”. After a shaky start, Lozano Rolong’s Oi grew in confidence. Tenors Shengzi Ren (doubling as Mr Tozaki and Hokusai’s publisher Yohachi) and Luvo Maranti (the artist’s grandson), along with Chloe Harris as Hokusai’s second wife Koto, provided the most sustained and memorable performances. Edward Hawkins (Toshiro) and countertenor Collin Shay (von Siebold) were relatively incidental, but needful presences nonetheless. 

The Chorus, engineered in a blunt reactive fashion, delivered a gutsy compulsive edge, purposefully motivated despite the occasional and repetitive banality of their bullet-point utterances. At one point, joined by children’s voices, an ecstatic leaning to Benjamin Britten informed one of The Great Wave’s most uplifting scenes.

But the winning key element of this new opera is surely to be found in the orchestra pit, where music director Stuart Stratford and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera issue a side to Fujikura’s creativeness that really does sing. His orchestral score harnesses a passion and narrative momentum absent from much of the vocal writing, presenting a captivating menagerie of detailed, magical imagery that rides atop a thrusting cinematic undercurrent. It’s just not quite enough to offset the weaknesses of substance and prolixity that surround it.

It’s worth mentioning, too, that Thursday’s opening performance was dedicated to the memory of Scottish Opera founder Sir Alexander Gibson, born 100 years ago this month. Who knows what he would have made of The Great Wave? At the very least he would have applauded the sincerity of the effort bravely undertaken by a company he loved.

Ken Walton

Further performances of The Great Wave are at the Theatre Royal Glasgow (14 February) and Edinburgh Festival Theatre (19 & 21 February)

(Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic)

Orchestra of Scottish Opera

Posted on by

Ayr Town Hall

The Orchestra of Scottish Opera summons a tangible sense of release when given the opportunity to feature centre stage rather than customarily hidden within the cloistered confines of the orchestra pit. Such euphoria was manifest in Ayr Town Hall on Wednesday, where the players were in full view for an Operatic Gala concert that coasted its way through a sequence of sundry operatic excerpts ranging from Mozart to Puccini.  

Swedish conductor Tobias Ringborg had no less a part to play, visibly consumed by the music, yet relaxed enough to give the band sufficient leeway to steer its own course through the more detailed expressive niceties. It was these nuances – reactive and instinctive support to the spontaneous whims of the evening’s vocal double act – that introduced a sense of adventure to mostly well-known operatic numbers.

That double act consisted of former Scottish Opera Emerging Artists Catriona Hewitson (soprano) and Ross Cumming (baritone) featuring variously in tandem as duettists, and individually in solo arias. Bristling with personality, their performances – if occasionally subsumed by the heft of the orchestra – oozed charm and instant adaptability. 

Music from just two operas took us up to the interval: Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. It provided a neat complement, the graceful good humour of Mozart thrust viciously aside by the restive bombast of Donizetti. The respective overtures brought mixed results, the orchestra more at home with the fulminating Pasquale than the rakish precision of Figaro. It was the starry adaptability of Hewitson and Cumming, self-assured in their animated characterisations, that captured the moments.

The second half introduced a wider miscellany. From Gounod’s Faust, the wild exuberance of Phryne’s Dance and sweet-scented Dance of the Trojan Women set the scene for Cumming’s noble vision of Valentin’s Act II aria Avant de quitter ses lieux. Howitson responded with the joyous  gymnastics of Je veux vivre from the same composer’s Roméo et Juliette. This French segment ended with Ernest Guiraud’s orchestral Suite No 1 from Bizet’s Carmen, the seductive spirit of the music more consistently conveyed than some of the instrumental detail. 

Thereafter, the focus shifted to Italy, firstly in a pairing of Puccini arias that occupied either end of the popularity scale. Love’s frustrations found a lofty emotional outlet in Cumming’s rapt performance of the lesser-known Questo amor, vergogna mia from Edgar, an early Puccini opera often considered his “biggest flop”. Gianni Schicchi’s O mio babbino caro, on the other hand, required no justification. Hewitson’s unaffected delivery bowed respectfully to its natural and popular appeal.   

Lusciousness prevailed in the instrumental Intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana, before the duettists struck up a whimsical show stopping finale with Quanto amore from Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore. Except that wasn’t the end. It was back to Mozart for a well-earned encore, the instantly recognisable duo La ci darem la mano from Don Giovanni. 

Ken Walton

Scottish Opera: La boheme

Posted on by

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

ALTHOUGH both Madama Butterfly and La boheme are essentially intimate personal tragedies, there is little doubt that Puccini intended wider resonance than their domestic settings. Both have proved perennially popular, but while the former has invited epic reinvention on the opera stage as well as in Boublil and Schonberg’s Miss Saigon (and more recently David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly), the latter, notwithstanding the musical RENT, has tended to be a staple of smaller-scale productions.

Happily, the Canadian direction and design team of Andre Barbe and Renaud Doucet gave the work a proper full-fat production for Scottish Opera in 2017 and this revival seems even sharper. It is framed by the slightly distracting conceit of being in the imagination of a present-day tourist to Paris, but that device undoubtedly works to the ambitions of universality that the production and the composer share.

The bulk of the action takes place in the “Jazz Age” of the 1920s, and the parallels between the lives of the haves and have-nots then and that gap a century later scarcely need underlining. In the world of these characters, the source of no-one’s money is a mystery, old sport.

The long contemporary scene grafted on to the front of Puccini’s score segued, with pitch-perfect precision, from a recording into a live performance of the overture, and it was immediately apparent that the orchestra, under the baton of Scottish Opera’s music director Stuart Stratford was on board for the fully-realised production. The rich, sumptuous sound from the pit was perfectly balanced by the Onstage Banda, with Puccini’s specific scoring further enhanced by a solo interlude from accordionist Djordje Gajic before Act IV.

The transition that made the production, however, came between the first two acts, when the chilly apartment of the four artists was swept away by a streetscape incorporating much more than Café Momus, with puppets, fairground rides and an art gallery all gloriously populated by an immaculately-drilled chorus of adults and children.

The stage craft on display there is emblematic of the production, superbly lit by the directorial partnership’s regular designer Guy Simard, where everyone knows exactly where they have to be at every moment.

That standard of excellence ran through the cast of principals, with Hye-Youn Lee returning as Mimi and giving a performance as moving as it is beautifully sung. Guatemalan tenor Mario Chang made a memorable company debut as Rodolfo, and the ensemble strength included a very carefully characterised Marcello from Roland Wood and Rhian Lois giving her Musetta an equally thoughtful portrayal. One of the current cohort of Scottish Opera Emerging Artists, Edward Jowle added another feather to his cap as the musician, Schaunard.

Keith Bruce

Touring to His Majesty’s, Aberdeen (Oct 30, Nov 1); Eden Court, Inverness (Nov 6 & 8); Festival Theatre, Edinburgh (Nov 14, 16, 18, 20 & 22)

Picture of Rhian Lois as Musetta by Mihaela Bodlovic

Scottish Opera: Opera Highlights

Posted on by

Scottish Opera: Opera Highlights

Gartmore Village Hall

With its community-run pub, The Black Bull, next door, Gartmore Village Hall in the Trossachs has the atmosphere of some of the further-flung venues that Scottish Opera’s small scale touring operation reaches, like the early November dates in Lochinver and Glenuig on this current outing.

It beggars belief that Kenneth MacLeod’s late-20th century office set, complete with watercooler and Mac Classic computers, fits into the small van that has traditionally been used for these excursions, and its quality of build and attention to detail speaks of the ambition of this iteration of the project once known as Opera-Go-Round.

No longer a sequence of party pieces with a few rarities to add spice, Opera Highlights has become a directed show (Emma Doherty this time out) that links extended excerpts from three operas and all of a fourth (Barber’s A Hand of Bridge) in an invented scenario – a farewell bash in the retro-office during which all manner of interpersonal relationships come to light.

It’s fun – if never quite funny enough as yet – but not the main point of the exercise, which is to give four young singers and a hard-working repetiteur at the piano (Meghan Rhoades, one of three of the current cohort of Scottish Opera Emerging Artists involved) the opportunity to strut their stuff, and to fly the national company’s flag outside of Scotland’s big cities.

The mission of taking proper singing to Crail and Nairn and Castle Douglas and Castlebay is admirably accomplished. Baritone James Geidt opens proceedings as Tonio from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and later takes the role of Silvio, while tenor Luvo Maranti plays cuckolded Canio and gets the big aria that closes the first half.

Soprano Ceferina Penny, making her company debut, comes storming out the blocks as Gounod’s Juliette – and the departing colleague in the workplace scenario, which is established with Maranti as Romeo and mezzo Chloe Harris doubling as his page Stephano and her nurse, Gertrude.

As everything is sung in good English translations (Bill Bankes-Jones, Amanda Holden and David Pountney among the wordsmiths), the office setting is believably maintained, with the Barber an interlude at the party that is inventively echoed in the sequence of selections from Strauss’s Die Fledermaus that brings the whole show to a suitably champagne-fuelled climax.

The quartet really comes into its own as a group then, and the most accomplished performer, from the moment she swaps her trainers for work shoes under the office computer-desk at the start to her drink-fuelled Chacun a son gout, is Harris. She also has the best of the evening’s outliers in the Letter scene from Massenet’s Werther, duetting with Penny, and an aria from Handel’s Alcina.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Sally Jubb

Full tour details scottishopera.org.uk

Lammermuir: Scottish Opera Double Bill

Posted on by

St Mary’s, Haddington

Perfect though the use of Haddington’s Corn Exchange proved for Britten’s Albert Herring at last year’s Lammermuir Festival, Scottish Opera’s return to St Mary’s for its 2025 contribution was both necessary and welcome.

Primarily that was for musical reasons, and the superb playing of the full Orchestra of Scottish Opera for Maurice Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and William Walton’s The Bear, under the energetic baton of Alexandra Cravero. The Ravel, of course, is packed with delightful orchestral detail. The story of the convoluted love-life of Concepcion, the fickle wife of clockmaker Torquemada, had every possible expression of the passage of time, with onstage metronome, ticking percussion and chiming bells most obvious.

The score of The Bear proved no less fascinating, and as it includes knowing nods to other composers, including Debussy and Britten, it is far from unlikely that Walton had the early work in mind as well. This is the playful Walton of Façade rather than the composer of the more problematic Troilus and Cressida.

In putting the two works together, the company was also making use of its resident company of Emerging Artists, and regular soloist Jamie MacDougall – and had the added impetus of producing a staging that will work in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal and Edinburgh Festival Theatre during the autumn season.

That will mean an expanded scenic design, but it was clear that the essential elements are already in place in Kenneth Macleod’s work for Jacopo Spirei’s production.

It paid to pay close attention to the supertitles in L’heure espagnole, which faithfully rendered the jokes being delivered in French by the cast. Lea Shaw’s knowing performance as Concepcion had the lion’s share of these and she played them to the hilt, matched by Edward Jowle’s broad portrayal of lustful banker Don Inigo.

South African tenor Luvo Maranti probably got more laughs though, for the poetic attempts by his character, Gonzalve, to play up the role of romantic lover, while baritone Daniel Barrett caught just the right tone for the naïve Ramiro, in a production that was not really about subtlety at all.

Making good use of the whole performance space in a way that was new to Scottish Opera’s work in the venue, there was a lot going on, but then that is exactly what farce is all about.

The premise of The Bear might be just as absurd – what purpose can a widow have in trying to punish her faithless husband by refusing any human interaction herself after his death? – but its source in a short story of Chekhov means we are in a very different world.

Barrett, making his Scottish Opera debut as a new recruit to the team of Emerging Artists, was superb as the titular Bear, a boorish creditor of the dead man who finds himself falling for the widow. Chloe Harris, as bereaved Yelena Ivanovna Popova, also gave a nicely-measured performance, and a definitive reading of the evening’s hit tune – the mezzo party-piece, I Was A Constant, Faithful Wife.

Keith Bruce

Repeated at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, October 18 and 22 and Edinburgh Festival Theatre, November 15.

Picture of Daniel Barrett and Chloe Harris in The Bear by Sally Jubb

Opposites Attract

Posted on by

Director Jacopo Spirei tells KEN WALTON why his new Double Bill production for Scottish Opera, opening at Lammermuir Festival, has all the quirky trappings of a Netflix series. 

Ready for a double dose of black comedy? That’s what Scottish Opera is promising in an upcoming operatic head-to-head that packages Ravel’s waspishly satirical L’heure espagnole with the Chekhovian darkness of Walton’s The Bear. This new Double Bill production, created by Italian opera director Jacopo Spirei, takes the opening night spot (4 Sep) at this year’s Lammermuir Festival, a one-off performance in St Mary’s Church, Haddington, with later repeats in Glasgow (18 & 22 Oct) and Edinburgh (15 Nov).

Written over half a century apart – Ravel’s sensuously-scored, Spanish-flavoured one-acter was premiered in 1911; Walton’s parodic burlesque a nippy child of the mid-sixties – their mutual compatibility may not seem immediately obvious. Spirei, while absent from the initial decision to couple them, has no such qualms. “Musically there’s a good relationship, both being experiments from otherwise symphonic composers,” he argues. “And from a theatrical point of view, these are both stories of strong independent women within the context of a man’s world: women that define morals in their own very specific way. Treating them as comedies was a clever way of doing it.”

L’heure espagnole is often viewed as an Ayckbourn-style bedroom farce, a clockmaker’s lascivious wife using the convenience of her lustless husband’s clocks to conceal her multiple lovers – opera buffa reborn. The Bear occupies a darker world, the recently-widowed Popova learning of her late husband’s infidelities and mountainous debts, only to fall for the messenger, a ruthless debt collector. 

L’heure espagnole – “a world of fantasy among ticking clocks” (Photo Sally Jubb)

Spirei has previously produced both operas apart – in studio settings in Copenhagen – but never in tandem. The Bear on that occasion was paired with Bruno Maderna’s modernist 1973 chamber opera Satyricon. “That demanded a very different co-relationship which led to treating the Walton more like the Chekhov play it’s based on.”

“The trick in making it work with the Ravel is to put them in dialogue”, says Spirei. “Think of a Netflix series like Black Mirror, where similar themes are treated in completely different ways. The way I work with the designer [Kenneth MacLeod] is to emphasise the contrast. So you have one opera that is incredibly colourful and full of life, and one that moves at completely the other end, which is a funeral parlour: from colour, colour, colour to classic black comedy. In a way the humour is similar, but one is a very particular French opera, the other very English. That creates a very exciting dialogue.”

That applies equally to the music, he explains. “Walton’s is a lot more rhythmic in a way. The percussive element is much more predominant, his way of setting words is exceptional, unparalleled in the 20th century. It’s fascinating how it feels like a play, yet is an opera. And it’s very quirky, fascinatingly surreal. A bit like Fawlty Towers.

“On the other hand, a sense of orchestrated landscape distinguishes Ravel’s writing. You do feel you are suspended in a world of fantasy among ticking clocks. The way he paints the nuances, however, points to an extraordinary creative depth.”

Above all, Spirei is having fun, and Scots-based designer Kenneth MacLeod is playing along, especially where the challenge has been to create a design solution flexible enough to meet the demands both of this week’s Haddington church setting and future theatre performances. 

“To exist anywhere it sort of needed a visual environment that was valid everywhere, something universally familiar like an internet browser. We’re so used to this idea, all those streaming platforms. With the church, however, we’ve taken a slightly more site-specific approach, using the wider space to full advantage.”

The cast are up for anything, he adds, a potent mix of youth and experience. “Some are Scottish Opera Emerging Artists, some former Emerging Artists.” Then there’s Jamie MacDougall, a seasoned regular in comic roles for the company, playing duped husband Torquemada in the Ravel. “Oh my God, how can you stop him? He’s extraordinary, like a film actor,” insists Spirei.

While this production marks Spirei’s debut with Scottish Opera, it’s also a chance for the 50-year-old Italian to finally honour the memory of his close friend and mentor, Sir Graham Vick, who served as director of productions at Scottish Opera in the 1980s, creating many momentous – some highly controversial – productions in the process. 

“That’s one of the reasons I said yes to coming here,” he reveals. “I wanted to reconnect with that part of Graham’s past. For me he was a mentor as well as a teacher. I started working with him when I was 26. We worked together for a long time, then I started directing my own stuff, we became good friends and remained close till the end. He was one of these people you could exchange ideas about process, about work – a mentor in the true sense.”

Remembering Graham Vick

Vick, who went on to found the Birmingham Opera Company in 1987, establishing its award-winning policy of staging groundbreaking productions in unusual venues, died in 2021, aged 67. Did the young turk who ruffled the feathers of traditional Scots opera-goers in 1985 with his infamously lavatorial Don Giovanni temper his aesthetic in later years?

“Yes, in a way he later found a different field of research,” Spirei believes. “It was no longer about provoking audiences, more about involving the widest of audiences. His work in Birmingham, for example, oriented in that way, working with volunteers from all paths fo life. That led to a period of very aesthetic theatre in the 1990s and early 2000s, to a lot of beautiful looking shows, still always gripping and cutting, but with a slightly more pleasing edge. He just found a different path and started questioning the future of opera, how it needed to be to function within society. In that way I always found myself at home working with him.”

How confident is Spirei in opera’s future? “The art form is fine,” he insists. “Let’s face it, opera has been declared dead ever since I started in the business, yet it’s still healthy and strong, finding its way through new compositions, new repertoire. The problem is never the art form. The art form has an energy and power of its own – it just has to be released.” 

Scottish Opera presents its Ravel/Walton Double Bill at St Mary’s Church Haddington on 4 Sep as part of the Lammermuir Festival. The 2025 Festival runs from 4-15 Sep at various venues around East Lothian. Full details at www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk

(Photo Jacopo Spirei – Marco Borrelli)

EIF: Orpheus and Eurydice / Book of Mountains and Seas

Posted on by

Edinburgh Playhouse / The Lyceum

At the March launch of the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival programme, the Festival’s Head of Music, Nik Zekulin, conceded that the opera content was slighter than in other years.

On paper that may have looked the case, but the reality has felt rather different, and not only through the presence of opera in concert. Whether it inspired or consoled, or simply wore you down, the Festival opener, Tavener’s The Veil of the Temple, was in many ways operatic in scale and style. Its structure, in less epic form, found echoes in both the works presented as staged operas in the Festival programme, even if their music was very different.

With no opera at all in the Festival Theatre, given over to runs of theatre and dance productions, the big event was the use of Edinburgh Playhouse for Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, recreating an Opera Australia production by the director of physical theatre company Circa, Yaron Lifschitz, and his troupe.

Soprano Samantha Clarke, who sang Eurydice and Amor, personified this venture in that her career bounces between Australia and the UK. The Australian performers were joined on stage by the Chorus of Scottish Opera, whose set-builders also made the staging, and Handel specialist Lawrence Cummings conducted the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the pit.

Clarke was excellent, as were the chorus, but the star vocal turn of the show was counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, an EIF favourite who sang with extraordinary power and also engaged with the physical action, if not to quite the personally perilous degree the superbly-choreographed acrobats displayed.

Far from being in any way gimmicky, they told the story as eloquently as the text and music, from the dramatic trapeze descent of Eurydice to the Underworld to a nicely ambiguous interpretation of Gluck and librettist Calzabigi’s grafting of a happier ending on to the classical tale.

Although none of the forces involved were huge, the production needed the vastness of the Playhouse, and – just as importantly from the EIF’s point of view – attracted an audience that filled all of the seats.

Ancient Chinese myths inspire Huang Ruo’s opera, confronting humanity’s complex relationship with nature.

It is more debatable whether Huang Ruo’s Book of Mountains and Seas was any more “opera” than The Veil of the Temple had been. If one of the delights of the Gluck had been the realisation of the rich orchestration, Ruo’s music is sparer, if never quite as austere as Tavener’s often was.

The Chinese-born American resident is a composer of operas – and it will be interesting to see if this work was paving the way for an EIF run of a larger work – but this was a work for chamber choir and puppetry, using four of the ancient Chinese stories from the titular book.

Basil Twist, designer of the National Theatre’s Studio Ghibli adaptation My Neighbour Totoro, was director and his puppetry is of the modern school familiar from The Lion King and War Horse, and in the global perambulations of Little Amal and The Herd. If not so gasp-inducing, his six-strong team, who created galaxies of lantern suns, a bird princess, an archer god and a sprinting giant, supplied the parallel technical expertise to the Circa team in the Gluck.

The dozen singers of Ars Nova Copenhagen were in the Theatre of Voices mould, and directed by counter-tenor from that ensemble, Miles Lallemant. The constant flow between the male and female voices and between honed ensemble and some glorious solo singing was compelling, and Ruo’s music is delightfully hard to pin down, with a global range of influences but a voice entirely his own.

Often the most identifiably “Chinese” element of the sound came from the two percussionists, the only instrumental content and played with quite startling virtuosity. Even there, however, there were Latin American and African elements in what was truly the sound of “world music”.

Keith Bruce

Scottish Opera: Trial by Jury / A Matter of Misconduct!

Posted on by

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

Not so very long ago, the activities of Scottish Opera were siloed so that the most a young musician recruited to the Emerging Artist programme might expect beyond the perennial four-singers-and-a-piano touring show was a step-out role from the chorus in a mainstage production.

Perhaps hastened by the strictures of the pandemic, that is no longer the case, and this double-bill, which goes on to play the summer season of London’s Opera Holland Park after its Glasgow and Edinburgh dates, gives the current cohort of young singers an excellent opportunity to strut their stuff.

The pathway is clearest in the world premiere after the interval, because composer Toby Hession – who also conducts the whole evening – and librettist Emma Jenkins honed their partnership for those Opera Highlights tours. Their shorter pieces, Told By An Idiot and In Flagrante, were the best of an initiative to include new works, and the latter was very much a stepping stone to A Matter of Misconduct!

Sharing more than an exclamation mark with Jonathan Dove’s Marx in London!, the pair’s interest in creating contemporary comic opera is nonetheless a far from over-populated field, and A Matter of Misconduct! pulls no punches in getting its laughs. The explicit vocabulary in Jenkins’ text is rare on the opera stage, and in baritone Ross Cumming, as ambitious MP Roger Penistone, they have a singer whose performance skills are already well-established.

The scandal that threatens his Parliamentary progress involves his wife Cherry (mezzo Chloe Harris) and her own ambitions to be a wellness guru, and their “allies” in trying to bury it are press secretary Hugo Cheeseman (bass-baritone Edward Jowle), lawyer Sylvia Lawless (soprano Kiri Kaplan) and special advisor Sandy Hogg (tenor Jamie MacDougall). Filled with barbs at both Westminster and Holyrood (a motorhome predictably figures), the script is confident enough of its terrain to make a serious point at the end and Hession’s score is as assured, with particularly good, and challenging, arias for Kaplan and MacDougall and a memorable duet for Harris and Cumming.

It says a great deal for the new piece, directed by Laura Attridge, that it can follow a brilliant revival of Gilbert & Sullivan’s first hit, marking the work’s 150th anniversary. John Savournin’s Trial by Jury is set in a 1980s television studio and Jowle, as studio floor manager rather than court usher, sets the scene before a note of music is heard.

The directorial device works a treat, and the young cast have MacDougall as Edwin, the Defendant, and veteran G&S man Richard Suart as the Judge leading the way with the campest performances. Even they are outdone by the Bridesmaids, brilliantly choreographed by Kally Lloyd-Jones, fronting a chorus in fine voice (as is the smaller one in A Matter of Misconduct!).

Whether from 40 years ago, or just a few months ago, the cultural references in both shows are absolutely spot on, and the singing onstage and playing from the pit as precise. The fact that these shows, alongside The Merry Widow, are going to London in their entirety, orchestra, chorus and all, should be a matter of no small Scottish pride.

Keith Bruce

Production shot of A Matter of Misconduct! by Mhaela Bodlovic

Scottish Opera: The Merry Widow

Posted on by

Theatre Royal, Glasgow 

Just about every Mafia movie caricature worms its way into Scottish Opera’s opening summer production – a 1950s-style ragtag of mobster boors, buffoons and nasal New York broads answerable to a Don who’s just as inept as them. 

All the more surprising when the work in question is Franz Lehár’s 1905 high society operetta The Merry Widow. With iron conviction and an instinctive eye for theatrical gold, director John Savournin – replacing Parisian ballgowns, chandeliers and pretentious manners with pin stripes, severed horse heads and earthy “swim with the fishes” patois –  has taken a huge risk with an old favourite and artfully brought it off.

The storyline is a gratifying fit, at the centre of which is wealthy widow Hanna, a pawn in the wheeze by those around her to purloin her wealth, a situation complicated by comic ineptitude and an inevitable love interest. Perfect for this update, given the preponderance of spoken dialogue, is the gritty new libretto rewrite by Savournin and his writing partner David Eaton. It goes full mobster vernacular. Offers made are definitely not to be refused.

Where the stage action moves with frenetic impatience, the visual experience is every bit as exhilarating. The set designs by takis present a vivid cocktail of glamour and glitz, with neat hints of kitsch. The Scottish Opera Chorus are a mesmerising tour de force, constantly on the move, singing with Broadway gusto. Savournin approached this production with a belief that operetta was the natural progenitor of MGM musicals. On this evidence, who would argue.

Certainly not this Scottish Opera cast, whose performances are wholeheartedly on message. Topping the bill, Paula Sides plays Hanna with glowing magnetism, an authentic Texan drawl and sensuous vocalism, matched by eventual lover Alex Otterburn’s deftly enigmatic Danilo. Baron Zeta is now Mafioso boss Don Zeta, portrayed with suitably wavering assertiveness by Henry Waddington. Rhian Lois cuts a cutesy presence as his scheming wife Valencienne, renamed Valentina. A frenzy of knockabout cameos add to the spectacle.

Equally smitten by the show-stopping razzmatazz is the Scottish Opera Orchestra, capturing the voluptuous cinematic sweep of Lehár’s score with unceasing charisma. Music director Stuart Stratford elicits their passions from the word go, honing the richest of colours – note the Mediterranean twang of the mandolin as the action switches to Sicily – and charting a musical ebb and flow that powerfully magnifies the narrative.

This production’s opening night had the entire Theatre Royal buzzing with unfettered laughter, an unmistakable measure of its success.

Ken Walton

[Image: Mihaela Bodlovic]

Glasgow performances continue till 17 May, with further performances in Inverness (22 & 24 May), Edinburgh (29 May – 7 June), and Aberdeen (12 & 14 June). Full details at www.scottishopera.org.uk

Scottish Opera’s new season

Posted on by

The new season unveiled by Scottish Opera marks a decade in post for Music Director Stuart Stratford, and it has been one of company stability and notable artistic successes. Before talking about what’s to come, he identified his own highlights of those ten years.

“I always feel there is still so much to do, but Puccini’s Il trittico was a highlight for the whole company. It was a major project for us. There are also the collaborations which produced Greek, Breaking the Waves and Ainadamar, which has gone to Detroit, Houston, the Met and Los Angeles but originated here.

“Then there are the community pieces, like Pagliacci in Paisley, Candide at Edington Street and Oedipus Rex at the Edinburgh Festival – those are the kind of projects we’re really interested in as a company.

“And there are the rare operas. It was great to have given the Scottish premiere of Daphne by Richard Strauss, and Scottish Opera should always be championing unusual pieces as well as the core repertoire.”

That said, the 2025/26 season, unveiled as the company opens a new production of The Merry Widow at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, has just the one show that really ticks the boxes for innovation and adventurousness. Like this year’s Edinburgh Festival programme and the coming season from the RSNO, it has all the hallmarks of being signed off in straitened times.

The exception is the world premiere of The Great Wave, a new work by Japanese composer Dai Fujikura and Scots librettist Harry Ross, best known in his native land previously as the producer of the award-winning presence of the British Army at the Edinburgh Fringe – “a foil to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo” as The List magazine put it.

Fujikura’s previous successes include an operatic version of  the Stanislaw Lem novel Solaris, and The Dream of Armageddon, based on an H G Wells short story, both of which involved Ross.

The new piece is the story of Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai and his daughter, Oi, and is being co-produced with KAJIMOTO, who will present the work in Kyoto and Tokyo.

Says Stratford, who will conduct: “Fujikura’s music is quite eclectic, avant garde meets Japanese mimimalism, and in this piece there is a big role for the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, which gives it  a really interesting sound-world.”

The other main house shows in the season are revivals: the Barbe and Doucet La boheme from 2017, which the pair will return to direct, with Hye-Youn Lee also returning as Mimi, and Sir Thomas Allen’s The Marriage of Figaro, back for another run but sung in English this time.

As with The Barber of Seville, Stratford believes the production will be reinvigorated by the change.

“There we saw a development in the performances and a renewed connection with audiences in the refreshed version. Boheme, on the other hand, I think loses some of its attraction if it’s not in Italian.”

Earlier next Spring, the Theatre Royal will also see a Saturday afternoon concert performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, repeated during the following week at Edinburgh Usher Hall, and Stratford says that is a taster of a new commitment.

“It was 2013 when we did The Flying Dutchman, so it is high time we tackled some Wagner, especially as the orchestra is playing as well as it has ever played – so you’ll see more in the coming years.”

As has become its custom in the past decade, the company starts its new season in Haddington at the Lammermuir Festival. This year that is a double bill, pairing comedies of infidelity, Walton’s The Bear and Ravel’s l’heure espangnole, which will be part of the festival’s commemoration of 150 years since the birth of the French composer. As has happened only more recently, the operas will also be seen later in both Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Although there is no staged community production this year, that work goes on, in primary schools as part of the Glasgow 850 celebrations, with the building of a children’s chorus that will feature in main stage shows, and with the establishment of an Edinburgh branch of the adult community chorus, mirroring the Glasgow one and following on from the work for the EIF Oedipus Rex.

Full details of the new season can be found at scottishopera.org.uk

Edinburgh’s gap year

Posted on by

Funding austerity has shaped this year’s International Festival, writes Keith Bruce

Politically-astute EIF director Nicola Benedetti prefaced the media briefing revealing her third Festival programme with an enthusiastic acknowledgement of the recent funding announcement from Creative Scotland.

It increased support for an expanded list of client organisations and assured many more arts companies of multi-year funding. Far and away the largest sum goes to the Festival itself, £3.25m in the coming financial year, rising to £4.25m in 2027/28, and Benedetti described the news that came at the end of January as “pivotal” for the whole sector in Scotland.

It did, however, come too late for this year’s Festival, which she would later describe as “more compact” than those of her first two years, and which clearly took shape in a restricted financial climate.

The black cover of the 2025 programme has a cut-out in it that reveals the theme the director has given to this year, The Truth We Seek, printed on page three inside. That gap at the front is, unfortunately, mirrored by the holes in the grid at the back of the brochure that everyone uses to plan their Festival-going.

A new play starring Brian Cox, Make It Happen, is the first event, at the Festival Theatre, but  after its run nothing happens there for nearly a week, until Scottish Ballet unveils its new Mary, Queen of Scots for four performances, which is followed by another four days with no Festival programming in the theatre.

The smaller Lyceum is also “dark”, in terms of International Festival shows, for over a week of the EIF’s three. Its shows include three performances in this year’s much-reduced opera programme, of Huang Ruo’s Book of Mountains and Seas, directed by the Olivier Award-winning designer of My Neighbour Totoro, Basil Twist. The other staged opera, three performances of an Australian staging of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, is the only use the Festival makes of Edinburgh Playhouse this year.

That makes for a lot of gaps on the fold-out venue grid in the brochure. The only venues without big empty spaces in their calendar are the Usher and Queen’s Halls and the EIF’s Hub home.

There are two more operas in concert at the Usher Hall, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev continuing their journey through Mozart with La clemenza di Tito and a residency by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano including Puccini’s Suor Angelica.

The EIF’s new Head of Music, Nicolas Zekulin, told Vox Carnyx that the event’s commitment to presenting opera hadn’t changed but the year-to-year reality always showed fluctuations.

“The opera offer this year fits in to what had been an ebb and flow. Last year’s was significant and substantial but the year before was less, so there has been a natural ebb and flow and I think this year fits into that pattern.

“Opera has multiple facets and this year has two unconventional productions, and sometimes those are the ones you want to show. The production in the Playhouse is about opening up that repertoire in a new way.”

It is the European premiere of the Opera Queensland production, made with the acrobatic troupe Circa, whose reputation was built at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This incarnation will have the SCO in the pit, Iestyn Davies as Orpheus and the Chorus of Scottish Opera, prepared by Susannah Wapshott.

In fact, as Benedetti noted in her presentation to the press, the 2025 Festival features all five of Scotland’s directly-funded national companies: the National Theatre of Scotland is Dundee Rep’s producing partner for playwright James Graham’s new Make it Happen and the RSNO performs both the Opening Concert of John Tavener’s epic The Veil of the Temple and the Closing Concert of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, where Scots mezzo Karen Cargill is one of the soloists.

Both of those also feature the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, which celebrates its 60th anniversary with a total of five concerts. It joins the LSO and Pappano for two concerts, performing in Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony and the Puccini opera, and the BBC SSO under Karina Canellakis for Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.

With the National Youth Choir of Scotland’s now-regular contribution to the Festival being that Opening Concert and one with the London Philharmonic under Edward Gardner and the RSNO Youth Chorus also involved in Suor Angelica, there is no shortage of local talent in this year’s line-up – perhaps a case of thrift, rather than charity, beginning at home.

Zekulin said that he was under no illusions about the realities of the Festival’s position when he took up his post.

“I was aware of the constraints from the start, and the need to be creative within a budget. Working within certain parameters is something we all do all the time, but this is an international festival so I still get to do amazing stuff – I can’t complain!

“What’s a gift for us with the recent funding announcement is that 2027 is the 80th anniversary of the Festival. That’s a signature moment and works out well for us. We can look at ’26 and ’27 in parallel and think about what that anniversary means.”

Other musical visitors this year include residencies by the youth orchestra from New York’s Carnegie Hall, NYO2, and Poland’s  NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra from Wroclaw, with whom Benedetti will appear as violin soloist. There are also concerts by the orchestra of the National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing, Ivan Fischer’s Budapest Festival Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Monteverdi Choir with the English Baroque Soloists and the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon.

The Queen’s Hall programme kicks off with the intriguing combination of percussionist Colin Currie and The King’s Singers and includes an equally promising programme from mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, as well as more familiar names including baritone Florian Boesch, Benedetti’s former trio partners Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynuk, the Dunedin Consort and the Belcea Quartet.

Public booking for EIF 2025 opens at noon on March 27 eif.co.uk

Picture of Nicola Benedetti in the Usher Hall by Ryan Buchanan; Orpheus & Eurydice by West Beach Studio

Scottish Opera: The Strauss Collection

Posted on by

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

For all that they contain fabulous music, have boasted the finest singers, and offer an onstage showcase to Scottish Opera’s excellent orchestra, the company’s Composer Collection concerts increasingly seem to fall between stools: neither the full score nor the greatest hits of the operas or their creators.

The poor attendance for this concert of three chunks of Strauss from his partnership with Hugo von Hofmannsthal perhaps suggests that such misgivings are commoner than the company might hope, but for aficionados of opera the inclusion of four selections from the pair’s rarely-performed final collaboration, Arabella, was the main attraction.

They included the only solo aria of the programme, from Roland Wood as Mandryka, but fans of the baritone had to enjoy that one brief moment in the spotlight because the main focus of the concert was on the female soloists, mezzo Hanna Hipp, and sopranos Rhian Lois and Helena Dix.

Dix conveyed the flighty nature of Arabella with ease. She and Lois, as her sister Zdenka, were a excellent double-act in the opening duet, full of conversational virtuosity, while she and Wood combined in the two duets that gave a flavour of the development and denouement of the plot. The respectful word-setting of the composer, whose librettist died years before the work saw the stage, was evident, while much of the best music came from the orchestra, conducted by Stuart Stratford, who was all over the dynamic details of the score.

The 1933 work was preceded by a section of the Prologue from the 1916 revision of Ariadne auf Naxos, which used all four singers but was built around the growing infatuation of The Composer (Hanna Hipp) with Zerbinetta (Lois). With Wood singing The Music Master, it also introduced Helena Dix, the superstar of the line-up, in the best possible way, as The Prima Donna. Theatrical tantrums rarely sound as good as this, with orchestra leader Tony Moffat and the wind soloists the instrumental stars of the smaller ensemble.

A much fuller orchestra took the stage for Arabella and the sequence from Der Rosenkavalier that followed the interval. Dix was, of course, The Marschallin, Hipp was also superb as Octavian, and Lois sang Sophie in three well-chosen sections from each of the acts, all three women emerging in a change of costume to bring some sense of a gala to the occasion.

It was as much of a delight, however, to be able to see as well as hear the players producing the details of the fabulous orchestral score, down to the tiniest details of hand percussion and including crisp, precise playing from the brass and winds.

As a concert programme, repeated at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall this evening, this tasting menu of Strauss was undoubtedly a success, but perhaps the company’s resources might have been better deployed on a full performance of the Arabella score, with the involvement of a stage director, in the mould of another strand of its recent work.

Keith Bruce

Scottish Opera: Makropulos Affair

Posted on by

Theatre Royal, Glasgow

In his penultimate opera, The Makropulos Affair, Leoš Janáček took a deep dive into the human psyche.  Is the secret to eternal life a precious gift or a wearisome curse, he appears to ask through the medium of his main protagonist Emilia Marty, an opera singer who is over 300 years old thanks to a secret elixir. She has disguised her longevity by inventing successive transformations of herself (though all with the initials EM), has reached a point where she needs to re-administer the magic potion, but having successfully procured the formula opts instead to end her weary existence.

The opera centres on the machinations of a long-running legal inheritance case, the litigants linked to the whereabouts of the original formula, on its tussles, tensions and the crushing dominance of Emilia superbly captured in Janáček’s intense, hyperactive score. What Scottish Opera brings to the table in this new co-production with Welsh National Opera (which premiered it in Cardiff three years ago) is a staging by Olivia Fuchs that feverishly amplifies the musical blueprint.

It is brutally direct, Fuchs creating (with the help of Nicola Turner’s epically stark and cavernous 1920s-style set, minimalist props of Gothic proportions, Robbie Butler’s shock-horror lighting and moody cinematic projections by video designer Sam Sharples) an intoxicating sense of the surreal alongside needle-sharp  characterisations. Just as the music sustains unceasing alertness and captivation from the Scottish Opera Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins, the theatre is vivid, electrifying and relentless.

So is David Pountney’s English translation which this evenly-balanced cast impart with a sharpness and clarity that almost, for once, makes the supertitles redundant. 

At its heart, though, is Orla Boylan’s commanding omnipresence as Emilia, as fascinating and scorchingly enigmatic as she is cold and manipulative. The rest revolve around her, their febrile self interests expressed to almost caricature extremes. Henry Waddington’s lawyerly Doctor Kolenatý is gnawingly bumptious; Mark Le Brocq, as Vítek, his highly-strung clerk. Roland Wood’s pompous Baron Prus cuts a striking foil to Ryan Capozzo as the excitable Albert Gregor. 

In their somewhat stereotypical character roles, Michael Lafferty’s haplessly fawning Janek and Alasdair Elliott’s ever-hopeful ageing lethario Count Hauk-Sendorf lighten the dark. Catriona Hewiston softens the mix with her glowing tenderness as budding opera singer Kristina.

While this production hits hard and fast, it somehow finds room for genuine belly laughs – even double entendres in the Great British farce tradition. All of which adds to the disarming humanity of this riveting show. There’s some finessing to do with one or two of the fearsomely difficult orchestra passages, and added scene-change music (from an unfinished symphony by Janáček) between the first two acts seems a little too manufactured, even twee, but never so much as to detract from what is a hard-hitting tour de force for Scottish Opera.

Ken Walton

(Picture credit: Mihaela Bodlovic)

Further performances 19 & 22 Feb in Glasgow; 27 Feb & 1 Mar in Edinburgh. Full details at www.scottishopera.org.uk

Return to the pit

Posted on by

Conductor Martyn Brabbins speaks to Keith Bruce as he makes his career debut in Scotland with Janacek’s The Makropulos Affair

As a mentor to young conductors at the St Magnus Festival and at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, as well as a regular guest conductor with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins is a familiar face in Scotland.

South of the border, his most recent full-time contract was as music director of English National Opera, a position from which he resigned in solidarity with his fellow musicians when ENO’s management failed to resist the imposition of strictures on its operations by the Arts Council of England.

At the end of this week, the conductor makes what may seem a belated debut at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow in charge of a main stage Scottish Opera production, directing a work that is a century old but new to him, and for which his enthusiasm is evident.

The circumstances that have allowed Brabbins to work with the company may be less than entirely happy, but England’s loss is assuredly Scotland’s gain. At the end of our conversation, the conductor alluded to the circumstances of his departure from ENO, and it was more in sorrow than anger.

“Having had that bruising end to my time at ENO, it’s wonderful to be here. Scottish Opera seems to be in a healthy way, the rehearsal process has been really smooth and I hope that ENO can get to a similar position.

“It is just not valued by the people in power in the way it should be. The more you diminish arts and culture the more you diminish society, and the arts seem very vulnerable at the moment.”

The invitation to conduct Janacek’s The Makropulos Affair may have sprung from Brabbins’ sudden availability, but it picks up threads from earlier in his career.

“In the 1990s I did a small scale Scottish Opera tour of Mozart’s Il Seraglio, which was a memorable experience. And [stage director] Olivia Fuchs and I were both assistants at ENO on Nick Hytner’s magical production of The Magic Flute, but this is the first time we’ve made a production together.”

This Makropulos Affair is a co-production with Welsh National Opera, who staged it in 2022. But as well as having a fresh cast, with only tenor Mark Le Brocq returning as Vitek, and a different baton, the opera will be sung in an English translation by David Pountney rather than in Czech.

“It’s a really well thought out, attractive and clear production of what is a rather strange piece,” says Brabbins. “Not only has it had a run with WNO in Cardiff, it went to Janacek’s hometown of Brno, and I think the staging really clarifies what is quite a weird tale of this woman who has lived to the age of 329.

“I have had the time of my life getting to know it and it’s been one of the most complex scores I’ve ever had to assimilate. That’s not because it’s complex in the way of the music of Harrison Birtwistle or Pierre Boulez, but because it has to feel very natural despite the bizarre way Janacek deals with musical pulse at times.

“His notation can be misleading until you get inside the piece. It took me a long time and it has taken the orchestra a lot of hard work to get inside the score in order to let the music speak – but I think everyone is having a good time with it.”

Oddly, perhaps, given that singing in English is an essential part of ENO’s mission, Brabbins confesses to ambivalence about the practice.

“I’ve always been in two minds about the wisdom of singing opera in translation. Personally, I don’t like to hear Italian bel canto repertoire in anything other than Italian, but with Wagner, with Mozart, and with Janacek it can work and I think it works well here. It is a bit of a labyrinthine story and doing it in English helps.

“The music is very connected to the Czech text so with David Pountney’s translation, which is very musical itself, sometimes you have to slightly adjust the rhythms so that they match English speech.”

Martyn Brabbins and Olivia Fuchs in rehearsals for The Makropulos Affair. Picture by Kirsty Anderson

The whole rehearsal process has been a journey of discovery for the conductor.

“It’s a long way from most of Janacek’s other operas. The natural world plays no part in this one while it features heavily in lots of the others.

“There’s something compelling about the main character, Emilia Marty. In terms of opera plot, very little happens. She turns up at a lawyer’s office looking for information about the elixir that has kept her alive, and it is basically a legal tale that unfolds.

“She’s a wonderful operatic diva who has had an incredible existence over her three centuries of life, but she won’t allow herself to be anything other than this cold questing being.

“Each act builds to a wonderful conclusion and the end of the opera as a whole is cataclysmically powerful, but what is unusual about the score, and a little like Wagner, is that it is one long mellifluous recitative. There is one set number in Act 2, but the rest of the piece is through-composed storytelling with no love duets or ensembles as such, like reciting a poem.

“You can’t compare Janacek’s music to anyone else. I’ve been re-reading the poems of Edwin Morgan, who I met many years ago. His poetry is similarly a completely unique take on the use of language and sometimes really quite extreme.

“He reveals things in a different light, and it’s the same with Janacek – the language is familiar, and his tonal orchestral and vocal music is very attractive, but it doesn’t take the turning one expects. That’s what has made it a real journey of discovery for me and I hope it will intoxicate our audience with its heady mixture of drama and music.”

After The Makropulos Affair, the conductor’s return to the opera pit continues at Grange Park, with his old orchestra from ENO playing for David Pountney’s production of Tchaikovsky’s story of wartime in Ukraine, Mazeppa. Brabbins then has two new orchestral appointments to take up, as Chief Conductor of Sweden’s Malmo Symphony and then as Chief Conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of India.

“Malmo is a great orchestra with a wonderful hall and enthusiastic audiences, and I’m hugely looking forward to that. The Indian orchestra is seasonal, with a nucleus of local musicians who work as a chamber orchestra. There’s a joy in the music-making there and it’s a very special environment.”

Brabbins’ describes the BBC Scottish as “a constant friend in my life” and his next project with the SSO is the regular conducting course with students from the UK and overseas in mid-June. Next month sees the release of his premiere recording of Tippett’s New Year with the orchestra, which was performed in concert last year, and reviewed on VoxCarnyx.

Scottish Opera’s The Makropulos Affair opens on Saturday February 15 for three performances at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, followed by two at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre.

Production picture of 2022 WNO staging of The Makropulos Affair by Richard Hubert Smith

Soprano’s Valentine’s return

Posted on by

Korean singer Sunyoung Seo won universal acclaim in her Scottish stage debut. She talks to Keith Bruce before concert appearances with the RSNO

Of the praise that greeted Sir David McVicar’s Scottish Opera production of Puccini’s Il Trittico two years ago, a generous proportion was accorded to Korean soprano Sunyoung Seo who made her company debut in contrasting lead roles in the first two parts of the trilogy, as Giorgetta in Il tabarro and as the titular Suor Angelica.

Her absence from the comedic third opera, Gianni Schicchi, means Scotland has heard her only in a tragic context – which this week’s Valetine’s Concerts with the RSNO in Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow might go some way to balancing.

That depends on how you regard the Wagner’s Dich, teure Halle, from Tannhauser, and the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, of course. Both are, however, celebratory pinnacles of the operatic soprano repertoire, and the latter is a work she has only recently added to her repertoire as she enters her 40s.

“I have also sung the first act of Die Walkure in concert, and Senta’s aria from The Flying Dutchman,” Sunyoung told Vox Carnyx.

“All of Wagner’s operas, with their mythological themes of salvation, their chromatic music, frequent modulations that almost feel atonal, counterpoint, and rich orchestration, have a powerful attraction. If the opportunity arises, I would love to take on other works that I have not yet performed in fully stage productions.”

Asked to identify the role that she regards most fondly, it is Dvorak’s masterpiece based on the Ondine story that she immediately names.

“Without a moment’s hesitation, it’s Rusalka. It is a work that gave me my European debut in 2011 at the Basel Theatre in Switzerland and it was also the piece that marked my professional debut in Korea in 2016. Rusalka holds a special place in my heart, like a first love.

“Given the nature of my voice, I am often cast in tragic roles. Most of the time, I play characters who either die or are involved in death. In the fall of 2023, I performed Tosca in Korea, and when I met the director, the first thing I said was, ‘I’m curious how we will kill Scarpia this time.’

“I’ve usually used a knife to kill Scarpia, but in that production, he was portrayed as a man with obsessive-compulsive disorder who covered all the furniture with thick plastic to keep it dust-free. Even the bed was covered in plastic, and I killed him by suffocating him with it, pressing it against his face.

“It’s fascinating to me that I get to live these extreme lives on stage and experience them actively. Every time I study a new piece, I find great joy in expressing and sharing the fresh, positive impressions I felt when I first encountered it.”

In those Scottish Opera roles, the soprano impressed as much in her acting as her vocal performance and she says it is her Christian faith that helps her bring a vibrancy to those dark stage moments.

“In opera, the more I identify with the situation and internalize the emotions, the more material I have to express.

“When performing the same role repeatedly, I always want to ensure that I avoid becoming mechanical and letting my emotional state become ‘numb’. For that reason, before every performance, I meditate deeply, and even on stage, I constantly pray for the presence of the Holy Spirit. I always pray that Jesus will imbue me with all the inspiration, talents, and abilities I need.”

It was the church in Korea that nurtured the young singer, long before her operatic career.

“I loved singing as a child and if guests were visiting our home or we were on family trips to the mountains or the beach during the holidays, I would often sing in front of my family. I started singing in the church choir at the age of 8.

“I was the eldest of three daughters, and my parents had no background in music, but they always encouraged and supported me. At the age of 11 I sang with the municipal children’s choir, and at 17 I began receiving professional vocal training in preparation for university entrance exams.”

Sunyoung eventually came to Europe to study at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Dusseldorf with Professor Michaela Kramer, with whom she still works today. She continues to live in Seoul, however, and maintains strong links with Korea’s National University of the Arts where she completed her undergraduate studies.

“I began my teaching career at my alma mater at the relatively young age of 35. In my classes with students, I often feel less like I am teaching them and more like I am sharing what I’ve learned, and in many cases, I feel that I learn from them as well.

“The university boasts a high success rate in international competitions and with prestigious opera houses and orchestras around the world. Our school is a specialized arts institution consisting of six colleges: music, dance, fine arts, theatre, film, and traditional arts. Students are encouraged to experience classes from other departments, allowing many singers to gain valuable acting experience in the theatre department.”

Balancing her international career with teaching responsibilities at home means that opportunities to hear her voice in Europe can be rare. This year much of her work is in Korea and Japan, including a concert Rusalka, Mahler Symphonies No 4 and 2, a production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw and an appearance in Tokyo as part of a celebration of 60 years of Korea-Japan diplomatic relations.

Look out for her return in 2026 though, when she makes her Netherlands debut as Suor Angelica, and it is whispered, may well be seen again in a Scottish Opera production.

The RSNO’s Valentine’s Concert, which follows Wagner with Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, is at Dundee’s Caird Hall on February 13, Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on February 14 and Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on February 15, conducted by David Niemann.

Opera Highlights 2025

Posted on by

Lanternhouse, Cumbernauld

By the time the four young singers on Scottish Opera’s epic small-scale tour from Langholm to Lerwick perform their final show at Dundee Rep on March 22, the latest incarnation of Opera Highlights will be moulded in their image, and will doubtless bowl along with more pace than it did on the opening night. Beyond that, however, this production seems a work-in-progress in other ways.

Perhaps taking her cue from the structure of the company’s recent main-stage single-composer “Collection” concerts (The Strauss Collection is in Glasgow and Edinburgh at the start of March), recently-appointed Head of Music Fiona MacSherry has given this quartet longer sections of operas to get their teeth into. That gives the audience more of an idea of the scores from which some of the famous arias are drawn, and the performers the opportunity to  explore and express their characters more fully – up to a point. Baritone Ross Cumming’s pantomime Belcore was a show-stopper in this context, but I suspect he’d become tiresome in a full staging of The Elixir of Love.

A little oddly, for the shape of the whole evening, that sequence of music from Act 1 of the Donizetti, which opened the second half, was the last to be sung in an English translation, as everything had been up to then, and the next two pieces – mezzo Chloe Harris’s Scherza, Infida from Handel’s Ariodante and Cumming again in the programme’s most esoteric inclusion, O vin, dissipe la tristesse from Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet – might have been from a Highlights tour of old. Rossini songs from Les soirees musicales and an encore quartet arrangement of the meows of the Cats Duet – which eventually explained the proliferation of felines on Kenneth MacLeod’s station platform set – similarly harked back to the style of MacSherry’s predecessor, Derek Clark.

That stage design, together with accompanying sound effects and associated stage business, is key to director Rebecca Meltzer’s production, although irrelevant to MacSherry’s musical selections. The first half’s extended scenes arrive and depart as timetabled trains, a device that works well for the opening of Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, where tenor Robert Forrest has his best scene as Lensky, and the selections from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, in which the famous duet for Forrest’s Nadir and Cumming’s Zurga is overshadowed by soprano Kira Kaplan’s fine rendition of Leila’s aria.

Kaplan and Harris’s duet from Hansel and Gretel sits less comfortably with the railway backdrop, although it is well sung, and long enough to suggest Humperdinck’s Wagnerian side. The programme begins with a quartet from Beethoven’s Fidelio, its narrative complexity a tough first call for the audience, even in David Pountney’s translation, but ideal as an introduction to these excellent young voices and the ever-attentive piano playing of musical director Joseph Beesley.

Keith Bruce

Opera Highlights is in Kelso on January 28 and Langholm on January 30 and tours across mainland Scotland and to Shetland and the Outer Hebrides. Details at scottishopera.org.uk

Scottish Opera: Don Pasquale

Posted on by

Theatre Royal Glasgow

It’s been a good week for Scottish Opera. On Saturday the revival of its 2014 Barbe & Doucet production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale went down a storm. As the applause finally subsided, a Critics Circle representative appeared on stage to present the company with an Outstanding Achievement in Opera award for its 2023 production of Puccini’s Il trittico. In the wake of all that, this Friday sees the Glasgow opening of Britten’s Albert Herring, a triumph at last month’s Lammermuir Festival.

As for Don Pasquale, it was only a matter of seconds before fond memories of its comic energy, inspired updating (to a rosy, romantic 1960s Rome), and musical panache came flooding back. No sooner had the overture burst into life, played by an alert and full-blooded Scottish Opera Orchestra under musical director Stuart Stratford, than a giant projected comic strip scene-setter in sunny Italian fotoromanzo style set the visual dimension in motion, transitioning effortlessly to the live action.

The production is a triumph of synergy, inspired by the holistic creativity of André Barbe and Renaud Doucet – collectively in charge of stage direction, set and costume designs – and a singularity of purpose that draws a charming perspicacity from such a visual menagerie. The setting is a fading guest house amid the cheery sprawl of a picture book Rome, owned by an equally wizened, Scrooge-like Don Pasquale. Fooled by his own arrogance and the antics of those younger abler spirits around him, he’s taken for a ride, ultimately learning his lesson. 

So it’s all good fun, even where the tireless momentum of Donizetti’s music and a cast so hot-footed means it’s a challenge to keep tabs on every theatrical quip. David Stout’s unwavering magnetism as the wretched Pasquale is the linchpin, costumed in the unsavoury physical manner of a Sir Les Patterson figure but winning the sympathy vote as a likeable old fool. His nephew Ernesto is played with strait-laced naivety and sung with matching seriousness by tenor Filipe Manu. As Pasquale’s duplicitous doctor, baritone Josef Jeongmeen Ahn cuts a convincing schemer.

The figure that really lights up the action, though, is soprano Simone Osborne’s Norina, especially having come in as a stand-in on Saturday for the indisposed Stacey Alleaume. Any initial cautiousness was swiftly tossed aside, her performance growing into an agile, gloriously impetuous, ultimately intoxicating tour de force. 

Catchy cameo acting, too, from Jonathan Sedgwick as the doddering Porter, Frances Morrison-Allen whose 60-a-day Maid looks like she’s stepped out of a production of The Steamie, Steven Faughey as the food-stained Cook, and Jonathan Forbes Kennedy’s grey-suited Notary. The Chorus, equally fired up by this dynamic production, add splendidly to the organised chaos.

A question: did Nino Rota pinch that aching trumpet melody for the germ of his main soundtrack theme to The Godfather from Donizetti’s Act 2 opening? It’s hard to imagine not, especially when Saturday’s Scottish Opera soloist delivered it with such oozing Mediterranean nostalgia. That’s the real magic of this production – it’s simply loaded with fruity atmosphere.

Ken Walton

(Picture: Jane Barlow)

Further Glasgow performances on 17,20 & 26 Oct; Inverses on 31 Oct & 2 Nov; Edinburgh  on 8, 10 & 16 Nov; and Aberdeen 21 Nov. Full details at www.scottishopera.org.uk

Lammermuir: Albert Herring | Dunedin | Denk

Posted on by

Various venues, East Lothian

An organisation that has never had its troubles to seek, the present difficulties of Creative Scotland may be traced to the announcement during last year’s Lammermuir Festival that the event would receive no further funding – and the festival’s robust response to that decision.

In the professional media and the free-for-all of its “social” cousin, the debate about depleted arts funding in Scotland has now become predictably polarised between those who put the blame at the door of the Scottish Government and those who condemn the quango. Meanwhile artists and arts organisations persist in producing the goods, as Lammermuir is doing.

It has some valuable friends, both in its supporters, whose lobbying produced some reversal of the Creative Scotland decision, and its creative partners.

Directly-funded Scottish Opera is one of those, and it now gives its audience elsewhere a chance to see the work it makes for Lammermuir. That means the clever production of Britten’s Albert Herring which played Haddington Corn Exchange will also be seen in repertory with Donizetti’s Don Pasquale in Glasgow and Edinburgh this autumn.

Those transfers will require some re-design because Daisy Evans’ production sat very snugly in this venue, with a 13-piece band, under conductor William Cole, playing their socks off. The ensemble cast was a little uneven individually, but terrific as a group, with some outstanding solo turns and a very accomplished performance by tenor Glen Cunningham in the title role.

What Evans’ staging demonstrated was that the social satire of Eric Crozier’s libretto still works alarmingly well almost 80 years after the work’s premiere, and in a way it might not have done two or three decades ago. It’s a shame then, that some of the business did not match the detail of the text – and Britten’s immaculately tailored music. It is easy to overlook such small anomalies in revivals of Mozart or Verdi, but it jarred here.

A Dunedin Consort visit to Crichton Collegiate Church, near Pathhead and actually in Midlothian, has become another important Lammermuir ingredient. The star vocal soloist this year was counter-tenor Alexander Chance, who is surely now at the absolute peak of his abilities.

Those who have heard Chance’s voice fill Edinburgh’s Usher Hall would know that he needed much less than full-power in this small church’s impeccable acoustic, much used for chamber recordings. In precision and detail, from the notes on the score through inspired ornamentation to perfect Latin diction, Chance was flawless on repertoire by Vivaldi and others who made their name in the Vienna of the 18th century.

He didn’t have it all his own way, however, with familiar Dunedin instrumentalists including violinists Matthew Truscott and Huw Daniel, cellist Jonathan Manson, oboist Alexandra Bellamy and Jan Waterfield on chamber organ joined by bassoonist Inga Maria Klaucke, whose circular breathing with an early instrument on a Vivaldi concerto opened a revelatory programme.

It seems remarkable now that American pianist Jeremy Denk was not very well known in the UK when he first visited Lammermuir as a bold mid-pandemic hero in 2021, because he now looks so perfectly at home in the multi-purpose arena of Dunbar Parish Church.

His solo recital there was classic Denk, a second half of Brahms and Schumann played with just the right balance of precision pianism and performative expression, preceded by a delicious smorgasbord of pieces by female composers from Clara Schumann and Louise Farrenc to Missy Mazzoli and Phyllis Chen.

Presented in pairs that matched older composers with (mostly) living ones, it was as eloquent a case for the variety of women’s musical voices as any musician has devised, and would send any players in the audience in search of the works of Cecile Chaminade, Amy Beach, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Meredith Monk.

Denk’s first appearance in Dunbar this year was a demonstration of the possibilities of the venue. It reunited him with violinist Maria Wloszczowska for all four of the sonatas of Charles Ives, to celebrate the composer’s 150th birthday.

Their performances were virtuosic and compelling, but the genius of the concert was the presence of local choir Garleton Singers, conducted by Stephen Doughty, and a wind band from East Lothian Schools and the local community. The choir, stage left, sang half a dozen hymns through the programme – melodies that appeared in different guise in the sonatas – and the instrumentalists, at the back of the space, added three John Philip Sousa marches, as played by the street bands heard by the composer, directed by his father.

The first of those was The Liberty Bell, best known in Britain as the theme tune for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If a voice had then intoned “And now for something completely different”, it would not have been wide of the mark.

Keith Bruce

Pictures by Sally Jubb and Stuart Armitt

« Older Entries